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Maurice Newman: conservatives outsmarted — they apologise where they should demand apologies

A wake up call from Maurice Newman. The gravy train of bigger and bigger government is grinding to its inevitable halt, and Greece is the destination the Western Express is headed for. Those who promised that big-government could solve everything have bought votes, while using schools and universities to train a generation to hate free market competition. Young people were raised to blame the system and demand the handout, rather than take responsibility. The soft-west has gone too far left. The weak right has rolled over and tries to be a mini-left, settling for being the team B of “progressivism”. Newman’s best line is that the conservatives apologize where they should demand apologies. So true.

To illustrate dismal standards in science and the media, Newman cites joannenova.com.au (thanks Maurice), and thousands more Australians find out a small part of the scandalous failure of academia (specifically, Lewandowsky at UWA) and the ABC. The stories he refers too are: “Lewandowsky peer reviewed study includes someone 32,757 years old” and the “ABC got it wrong, BOM not concerned with Australian public being misinformed“. Ken Stewart at Kenskingdom deserves credit for catching out the ABC and BOM. Readers, when you want to throw your shoe at the ABC (or BBC or CBC), find the quote, and send it in (likewise for Fairfax and CNN etc). It is worth writing to these organizations and journalists, if only to expose how pathetic their answers are. Have confidence, we are getting to them. They still believe they are pro-science and real journalists. It pains them every time we expose their anti-science philosophy and catch them pandering to false-god “experts”.

Would-be journalists don’t want to wear the Useful Idiot badge — a real journalist would hate to think they were mere puppets of corrupt officialdom and crony capitalism. It hurts for them to hear the truth. We need to focus not on the answers they get in interviews, but more so — the questions they didn’t ask. And we need to remind them — at every step — that the opposite of skeptical is gullible.

The Australian  “The Left’s gravy train derailing “

Maurice Newman

IN the battle for ideas it is now clear the Left controls the commanding heights. In everything from the economy to sport, the prevailing direction is left. After decades of stereotyping, indoctrination and the clever use of language, Western voters have been conditioned to accept the beneficence of the state.

Politically this has set the stage for governments to see “market failure” in everything. It has become an excuse for an avalanche of regulations and regulators and allowed leftist intellectuals to incessantly bash the very essence of “capitalism”.

They have successfully implanted the notion that free market capitalism is synonymous with profiteering, greed, unequal wealth distribution and, the entrenchment of privilege which must be restrained.

Yet there is no competition commissioner to control the predatory actions of the state, or regulator to rein in reckless central bankers.

Voter acquiescence has been bought by both sides of politics, but conservatives everywhere have been politically outsmarted. They are apologetic when they should demand apologies.

Rather than be true to their values, they have too easily rolled over and allowed the Left to set the agenda on economics and social issues, incapable of arguing an internally consistent position. Quite often conservative policies are indistinguishable from their progressive counterparts.

 This is a systematic problem, not a grand conspiracy:

It isn’t necessary to engage in conspiracy theory to see how the Left has successfully infiltrated Western political thinking.

It starts with the fertile hearts and minds of the young. Teachers’ colleges, teachers’ unions and education bureaucrats have colluded over time in curriculums setting, gradually shifting the emphasis away from maths and hard science to the softer social sciences and leftist ideology.

 The failure of academia and the soft left media:

Multiple examples of the abandonment of scientific rigour and ethics in the interests of political propaganda continue to come to light. Blogger Joanne Nova, (joannenova.com.au) highlights a peer-reviewed leftist paper by psychology professor Stephan Lewandowsky (University of Western Australia), et al, which caused researcher Jose Duarte to be “flummoxed … why a paper so weak was written, but more so why it was ever published …” Yet while demonstrated as containing serious errors, the paper has not been withdrawn. Such is the audacity of the Left.

In similar vein Nova exposes the ABC for telling us that the Bureau of Meteorology claims Queensland has experienced “its worst drought in 80 years”, yet according to the BoM’s own website, the current drought is the worst in only nine years. But a compliant media would rather an inconvenient truth remain untold than spoil the left’s narrative.

Maurice Newman is the chairman of the Prime Minister’s Business Advisory Council. These views are his own.

The Australian

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